Last month my home PC crapped out on me, so started to gather parts for a new build. After a lot of back and forth I settled on the Thermaltake Core X2.

Its height and depth were no different than my old case, and only 5 inches wider I gained loads of room.

In my planning/building I have run across some things that may be useful to others. In the very few reviews I have seen on this case, some of this didn't come up, but could be because of the what I picked to put in this case.

The most annoying to me was found AFTER I purchased a Bitspower 250mm res. The plan was to run it between the case side and drive bays. I stupidly didn't measure before I bought. Ended up getting it swapped for a 150mm res. There is only 2" between the side support rail and the drive bay cages, the res is 60mm or 2.3" in diameter (not including mounts). So unless you are ok with the res leaning to one side when upright, then you will need a shorter res.

If you go vertical, and are keeping the optical bays like I am, then you are limited to 9.75" from the case floor to first drive bay.

The lower radiator mount. If you are running a slim rad with only the outside fans, you're good. If you are running push/pull on a slim, or thick rad with either push, or push/pull you will want to do some math.

From the lower rad mount to the lower drive cage is 1.5", if you run push/pull on a slim rad, that lower cage is got to go or you leave that one fan off.

If you are running a thick rad like my XSPC RX360 V2 then the lower drive cage is lost completely. That leaves you with 1.75" between the back of the rad face and the power supply cage. Depending how you orient your ports, this could be interesting for you getting both hose and fans in that space. Me I'm putting them to the front.

oh, and I know/understand why Thermaltake did what they did, but the upper rad mounts are such you cant push the rads to the back of the case, only to the front. slightly annoying, 5 minutes with a drill will fix the issue. They did it to keep the rad's off the back 120/140mm fan area on the off chance you would put a rad there... would have been nice to have the ability to push to the back.

so far, love the case. Not going to be exactly light when I done, but upside I don't LAN anymore so it will get parked under my desk until it dies LOL.

Been poking away at my build. Spent a lot of time trying to figure routing of stuff.

Discovered I need a couple more 90 fittings, those are in the snail mail. Not enough room between optical drives and the RAD fittings to do a "U" loop from one to the other.

This is the PWM spliter I'm using. It takes a single Mobo header and shares the PWM signal to up to 8 fans. It has hook and loop on it, so I can stick it anywhere in the case I want.

I could have made one, but this saved me the time and hassle of getting connectors and heating up the soldering iron.

Got the EK Vadar F4's mounted and in place. The cable on these are short compared to the cables on the Noctua fans, only about 8" long. But the reached the end of the rad where I put the one of the PWM splinters.

Outside of that, got the system up and running with the air cooling for now. Hope to have the 90 fittings here in next couple days. Think the post office sent them from Florida to STL via LA.

Resisting the urge to spend the money on a sleeved cable set for my power supply.

"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."
-Thomas Jefferson

Got fittings in, tubing ran, and been running the pump to bleed air from the loop and leak testing.

In the process things got added to the "To-Do" list.
-Shorten pump power wires, and sleeve the RPM lead.
-Make up/buy SATA power extensions for SSD's. Stock power supply cables are too stiff.
-Rig up a way to keep the EK Vardars at 7v, 5v is too low to make them run. The mobo control PWM floats, annoyingly. Full speed is WAY loud, and power draw is nuts, 2.6w EACH at 100% speed. I can make them run at fixed 550 rpm (lowest they spin) via the board. If you want to run the F4 Vardars get a fan controller. Otherwise get the F1 or F2 versions, those are more Noctua like on power draw.
-If can't/don't rig a 7v control then find a way to override Asus fan control stock profiles so I don't have to open the control panel to change the fan speed profiles. The stock PWM curve is too high for my liking. From what I can see I can create custom profile, but no way to set them to the desktop widget.

pump-res connection, I know its at an angle, need to pull the foam out now that most the air is out of the loop.

Lower rad

Upper rad cross over connection with the 90's. Glad I decided not to use rigged tube. The center line of the fittings is not the same due to the way the rad mounts are.

I wont be running the LED lights, but the Raystom CPU block comes with LED lighting I got the stock blue, so here is what that looks like. Like I said, I wont be using it as this sets 3 feet from my head when I sleep so no night lights LOL.

CPU Block in bright room

Dark

The res has an LED port on it as well. So I took one leg of the Raystorm LED cable and ran it to the res.

"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."
-Thomas Jefferson